The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War

by Nick Lloyd

The Eastern Front is the second book in British military historian Nick Lloyd’s trilogy about the First World War (the first book was about the Western Front). The book is around 500 pages long but it’s highly readable. In it, Lloyd looks at the ‘greater’ Eastern front: from Riga in the Baltic down to Thessaloniki in the Aegean. This is a less well-known story to English readers than the battlefields of France and Belgium, and the focus on the war from the point of view of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires makes for very interesting reading. Russia lost more than 2.3 million soldiers in the war; the Austro-Hungarians over 1.1 million, only to collapse in 1918—with, as Lloyd writes in the preface, “the disintegration of both empires creating a human catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.”

Note: if you’re interested in reading about the Eastern Front in English, see also books by Alexander Watson, such as The Fortress.